Limits by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online

I thought about it. There were lots of good metallurgists, but not many had been finalists in the Olympic gymna s tics team trials. I hadn’t won a place on the team, but I’d sure proved I knew how to handle myself. Add to that the heavy construction work experience and I was a natural. I sweated out the job appointment, but it came through, and pretty soon I was at Canaveral, strapping myself into a Shuttle seat, and having second and third thoughts about the whole thing.
    There were five of us. We lifted out from the Cape in the Shuttle, then transferred in Earth orbit to a tug that wasn’t a lot bigger than the old Apollo capsules had been. The trip was three days, and crowded. The others were going to Moon base. They refueled my tug in lunar orbit and sent me off alone to the Construction Shack. The ship was guided from the Shack, and it was scary as hell because there wasn’t anything to do but wonder if they knew what they were doing. It took as long to get from the Moon to the Shack as it had to get to the Moon from Earth, which isn’t surprising because it’s the same di s tance: the Shack was in one of the stable libration points that make an equ i lateral triangle with the Earth and the Moon. Anything put there will stay there forever.
    The only viewport was a small thing in the forward end of the tug. Na t urally we came in ass-backwards so I didn’t see much.
    Today we call it the Skylark, and what you see as you approach is a sphere half a kilometer across. It rotates every two minutes, and there’s all kinds of junk moored to the axis of rotation. Mirrors, the laser and power targets, the long thin spine of the mass driver, the ring of agricultural pods, the big telescope; a confusion of equipment.
    It wasn’t that way when I first saw it. The sphere was nearly all there was, except for a spiderweb framework to hold the solar power panels. The frame was bigger than the sphere, but it didn’t look very substantial. At first sight the Shack was a pebbled sphere, a golf ball stuck in a spider’s web.
    McLeve met me at the airlock. He was long of limb, and startlingly thin, and his face and neck were a maze of wrinkles. But his back was straight, and when he smiled the wrinkles all aligned themselves . Laugh-lines.
    Before I left Earth I read up on his history: Annapolis, engineer with the space program (didn’t make astronaut because of his eyes); retired with a bad heart; wrote a lot of science fiction. I’d read most of his novels in high school, and I suppose half the people in the space program were pulled in by his stories.
    When his wife died he had another heart attack. The Old Boys network came to the rescue. His classmates wangled an assignment in space for him. He hadn’t been to Earth for seven years, and low gravity was all that kept him alive. He didn’t even dare go to the Moon. A reporter with a flair for myt h ological phraseology called him “The Old Man of Space.” It was certain that he’d never go home again, but if he missed Earth he didn’t show it.
    “Welcome aboard.” He sounded glad to see me. “What do they call you?” he asked.
    A good question. Cornelius might sound a dignified name to a Roman, but it makes for ribald comments in the USA. “Corky,” I told him. I shrugged, which was a mistake: we were at the center of the sphere, and there wasn’t any gravity at all. I drifted free from the grabhandle I’d been clinging to and drifted around the airlock.
    After a moment of panic it turned out to be fun. There hadn’t been room for any violent maneuvers in the tug, but the airlock was built to get tugs and rocket motors inside for repairs; it was big, nine meters across, and I could twirl around in the zero gravity. I flapped my arms and found I could swim.
    McLeve was watching with a critical air. He must have liked what he saw because he grinned slightly. “Come on,” he said. He turned in the air and drifted without apparent motion—it looked like